


Five Thumbs

by fadagaski



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: 5 Times, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 03:43:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10936299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadagaski/pseuds/fadagaski
Summary: Five times Max gave a thumbs up to the Wives, and one time they gave it back.





	Five Thumbs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dotYoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotYoo/gifts).



**Angharad**

She saves his life. It's been a very long time since anyone has ever done that for him. The novelty of it jogs something buried deep. His lips twitch into a smile (of a kind). He gives her a nod and a thumbs up in thanks.

Her smile is radiant.

And then she falls.

~*~

**The Dag**

Finally Furiosa is breathing easy. There’s colour in her cheeks. Max’s vision is swimming but it hardly matters. For once in his miserable life, he is in the right place at the right time to make a difference.

“Is she going to be okay?” Cheedo whispers at his shoulder. It takes him a moment to string the words together, and then he nods. His hearing is beginning to buzz with blood loss.

“Here.” A hand wafts in front of his face; he sniffs the impossible. 

A peach. 

He follows the pale arm to the blonde-haired crazy girl. She reminded him of a snake at first. Her eyes are blue, wide and nervous. 

She bops the peach on his nose. “Eat it.” 

Max frees a hand from under Furiosa’s heavy (fragile, precious) skull to take it. The flesh is overripe and bursts under his teeth. Juice floods his mouth, trickles down his chin in sticky rivulets. He’s never tasted anything so good. 

Faster than he can track it’s all gone, and he’s left licking his fingers until there’s less syrup than salt. 

It’s only then he realises she was watching his every bite. 

She did well with the cannula, he remembers, though her hands had shaken badly. He glances down at the tube in his vein; she’d strapped it down with tape at some point, though he hadn’t noticed, focused as he was on Furiosa. 

“You look better already,” says the driving woman. There are murmurs from Cheedo and Capable. 

Max flicks his thumb up in gratitude.

~*~

**Capable**

There’s violence and bloodshed, as there always is, though Max has only the vaguest impressions in his memory.

His body bears true witness.

He doesn’t remember arriving. He doesn’t remember driving for days while he bled and bled, though he must have done to be here at all.

Of course he recognises the hewn rock walls, the high roof scoured out by Old World machinery long before the fall. He knows the stone bench under his back, though it’s been months since he was last here. 

His heartrate jumps up, thundering in his ears, and he’s just getting ready to launch to his feet when a hand descends to rest on his chest and, like a startled lizard, Max freezes. 

“It’s okay. You’re safe.” 

He knows that voice, feminine but low. When he looks as far right as he can, he catches a glimpse of spicy red hair. “Furiosa’s on watch. We stitched you up but you could use some rest.” When Max doesn’t immediately relax, the hand disappears, and returns holding a semiautomatic pistol. It is a reassuring weight across his stomach in easy reach. “You’re _safe_. Rest.”

Max nods and closes his eyes, raising his thumb up with the last of his dwindling energy.

~*~

**Toast**

The sorry excuse for a car that he drove to get to the Citadel is good only for parts. Still, it did him well getting him to safety, and he’s sorry to see it cannibalised. Sentiment and attachment are twin stones forever hanging about his neck, threatening to drown him, so he cuts those thoughts brutally short. 

“Good to see you awake.” He turns at the voice, and must look up at Toast perched on a stack of patched tyres. “Means I can gut your rig without feeling guilty.” 

Behind him, blackthumbs remove the two front doors. 

Toast must see some twitch of a grimace in his face at the creak and groan of old metal. “I got something to show you,” she says. She hops down with the agility of youth he sometimes remembers possessing and leads him into the bowels of the chop shop. 

At the back, tucked around a bend, in a room devoid of the skeletal men who still make Max skitter sideways, is a car with a familiar shape.

Max’s heart stops.

“They said it was dead, but Furiosa told me I could try to bring it back.” 

As if in a dream, Max floats towards the battered hulk of metal. His hands smooth over its frame, feeling every weld and hammer blow. She’s an ugly brute of a car, as monstrous as her driver, and the last link to a history almost out of memory. 

For a long time Max stands there, head bowed, trembling under an invisible weight. Toast doesn’t move or say anything. At last, Max prizes his hand from the car roof and gives her a thumbs up over his shoulder.

She leaves him alone after that.

~*~

**Cheedo**

Wandering as he had been, it’s something of a surprise to find himself in the sunlight at the edge of a small crowd of the former Wretched and Warboys. It’s not so much a room as a hollow in the side of the central spire. It is easily accessible to anyone on the ground, and offers some shelter from the prevailing winds. He doesn’t want to be there – crowds are not a favourite of his – when raised voices make him twitch. His curiosity is piqued, but there’s no way he’s going to wade through a potentially angry mob. Then he spots a route up the rock face; he only needs to ascend a few feet to get a good view of the situation, to decide whether he should run and what he might be running from.

Three people stand on a raised rock platform at the centre of the hollow, surrounded by the muttering crowd. There is a Warboy, and an old man and younger woman who both bear the look of the Wretched. The two men are in each other’s faces, though Max can’t hear what they’re shouting. The woman tries to step between them but, dwarfed by their anger, she is about as noticeable as a fly. Suddenly the older man grabs hold of the woman’s arm and tries to drag her towards him, though the Warboy reaches out to snatch her back, so she is caught in a tug-of-war between them.

Max has seen this scene played out dozens of times before. He makes ready to leave before it gets ugly. 

A fourth person steps forward from the crowd. Max’s eyes are immediately drawn to her, the long hair and familiar sorrowful expression of Cheedo the Fragile. The mob quiets, though she makes no noise, and watch as she ascends the stone platform. The young woman, freely crying, is taken into Cheedo’s arms. Both scowling men stop their posturing, and stand contrite as two naughty children. Cheedo ducks her head to whisper into the young woman’s ear, then stares hard at each man in turn. 

“We’re not things,” she intones, raising her voice to ring out over the crowd. “You cannot own a human being. Not as a lover. Not as a parent. Not as a god. We are not things!” She sweeps the crowd with a soul-searching gaze and, for a brief second, her eyes meet Max. 

He remembers kneeling over a scorched engine as a girl with smeared lipstick tried to run back into slavery.

He flashes her a thumbs up before he shimmies back down the rock face and disappears.

~*~

**Max**

A full tank. A familiar steering wheel. A bag of food, and another of tradeable goods. A rendezvous at the next full moon at the Bullet Farm to share food and intel. 

Max glances in his wing mirror as he fires the engine, catches a glimpse of four women watching over him with arms extended, thumbs up. 

His foot hits the gas and he’s gone.


End file.
